Hayden Dunham returns with a deeply immersive new body of work in NEVER IS OVER, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, unfolding across sculpture, sound and video in a meditation on connection, rupture and return.
Part installation, part spiritual proposition, the exhibition imagines redemption not as a moral act or divine reward, but as something built into the very fabric of the universe—a natural tendency toward reunion, recombination and oneness.
At the heart of the presentation, hundreds of suspended lilies and hand-written notes float overhead in the gallery’s atrium, weightless and seemingly untouched by gravity. Nearby, a monumental glass battery slowly leaks its contents downward into the lower gallery, where a ladder formed entirely of water appears to connect floor and ceiling—an image that feels at once impossible, delicate and quietly transcendent.
Throughout the installation, Dunham composes an enveloping sonic landscape that blends whale song with the 526-hertz frequency of a black hole—a cosmic register associated with healing and cellular regeneration. The effect is meditative, hovering somewhere between science, ritual and speculative cosmology.
Scattered through the exhibition are seven understated vessels containing the recorded voices of the departed—figures whose presence shaped Dunham personally, politically or imaginatively, including Marsha P. Johnson, Octavia Butler, Pippa Garner, Radclyffe Hall and Sally Ride.
Yet these voices remain inaccessible—sealed within their containers unless broken open, exposed to sunlight and released. In Dunham’s universe, rupture becomes transformation; separation becomes the condition for return.
That cyclical logic underpins the exhibition’s philosophical core. Drawing on atomic bonding, stellar collapse and Buddhist thought, NEVER IS OVER suggests that everything—from particles to planets, bodies to memories—moves toward reconnection. Matter itself seeks relation. Breakage is temporary. Reunion is inevitable.
Rather than offering apocalypse or closure, Dunham presents existence as an ongoing state of becoming—iterative, fluid and permanently in motion. The exhibition asks viewers to consider what happens when letting go is not loss, but the first step toward rejoining something larger.
With its blend of cosmic scale, intimate memorial and speculative spirituality, NEVER IS OVER feels both haunting and hopeful—a quietly radical meditation on how everything, eventually, finds its way back into relation.
NEVER IS OVER Hayden Dunham Opens April 30th 2026 Company Gallery
About the artist
Hayden Dunham channels the energies of earth and sky, research and ritual: a sculptor, performer, lyricist, musician whose work invites intimacy with the very forces that created the planet and the cosmos in which it spins. To get close to these forces is to slow down, open to mythic, elemental time. To get close to these forces is also to speed up, to experience the alchemical whirl that is forever change. To revolve, evolve, and open to constant transformation.
Steeped in environmental science, Dunham’s work explores decay, decline, disability, loss, and ecological collapse through molecular processes that invite audiences to connect to the flows beyond capital, beyond instrumentalized time. She orchestrates interactions between elements both visible and invisible, and her materials lists are attentive and expansive at once: tourmaline powder, pearls, volcanic water, lithium, silicon, syncopated beats, harmonies, glass, rubber, activated charcoal, lilies of the valley––she gathers widely into the cauldrons that make up the explorations into which she invites her audiences. Identities shift in and out of focus like dragonskins before shedding. Whether she is Hayden, Hyd, DD, QT, Quentin, or elixir itself, her work activates rites that connect beyond biography: to source, emergence, spirit, change.
Her work has shown at MoMA PS1 and Company Gallery in New York City; Artist Curated Projects, Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles; Thula Gallery in Reykjavik, Iceland; Artspace in Sydney, Australia; Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, France, among many others. Her exhibitions have also been included in the Shanghai and Gwangju Biennial. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
